To Paradise and Beyond

Yesterday Marcus and I went for our long-awaited walk. It was my new friend’s last day at George House – the following day he was off to Greece – and we wanted to make it a memorable one. Accordingly, after breakfast we packed water and a bar of chocolate and set out for a far-flung place along the coast called Kalabantia. This had apparently been an important harbour in antiquity and, if the resident guidebook was to be believed, remained a location of great natural beauty.

According to the same learned tome, from Kalabantia we could climb, via a venerable old footpath, to Alinca, a shepherding hamlet that sprawled across a rugged brow of mountainside some eight hundred metres above the sea. From there, if all went well, we would return, via the Kabak valley, to Faralya. It promised to be a long day.    

The weather was not particularly good for walking, being overcast, humid, and uncomfortably hot. An unattractive haze hung over the sea, which in the absence of wind lay motionless and gelid-looking. Sweat oozed from our faces within minutes of setting out; by the time we’d climbed the pine-shrouded path to the upland above the village, our breath came in gasps and our T-shirts were sodden. Nevertheless, our spirits were up and we felt energised alike both by the prospect of a long and demanding trek and the novelty of our destination.

On top of this we had something to look forward to upon our return to George House: early that morning Hassan had set out on one of his regular jaunts to the town of Fethiye, where he had promised Marcus he would try and track down some examples of the local wine. This was reputedly very good and we were looking forward, with the eagerness of committed drinkers, to sampling it when we returned from our walk in the evening. 

I wouldn’t necessarily say that it was alcohol that brought Marcus and I together, but there was definitely a shared interest there. My new friend was not like other Americans I had met on my travels. A freelance photographer, who worked documenting humanitarian crises around the globe (he was currently supposed to be on the Syrian border, covering the refugee situation, but the recent arrival of the Turkish army had muddied the waters there, and his job had been cancelled), he was quietly spoken, sure of himself but not overbearing, and relentlessly convivial. He was formidably well-read and, with the exception of South America, seemed to have been everywhere. More to the point, he appeared to have cut a free-wheeling swathe through the alcohol supplies of virtually every country he had visited.

To be fair, Marcus struck me as being a discriminating drinker who valued quality over quantity (unlike yours truly). But despite this reservation there was more than a grain of truth in the observation I had made during our first meal together at George House, to the effect that in the course of his travels he appeared to have drunk his way around the world several times over.

He was not above sharing his experiences, either. That first evening he spoke with pleasure and authority of a particularly fine plum brandy he had sampled in Serbia, an excellent aged Rioja he had drunk in Spain and a French Calvados he’d once sipped that had been hidden away, gathering flavour and intensity, since the time of Napoleon. He even trumped me, to my slight annoyance, on Greek tsipouro, a subject with which I had more than a passing acquaintance.

Had I tried aged tsipouro? he wanted to know, speaking with a sparkle in his eye, and of course I had to admit that I hadn’t. Indeed I had no idea that, on Crete at least, tsipouro ever lasted long enough to grow old.

A talented raconteur, Marcus spoke of other things besides alcohol. As we crossed the upland above Faralya – the honey man was hammering away at some new hives, while his goats gazed down balefully from the adjoining hillside – he kept up a lively stream of commentary on subjects as diverse as the beauty of the semi-colon (he wanted one on his gravestone, he declared), the masses of obnoxious young Israeli backpackers he’d encountered in Asia, and the lovely wooden schooner he’d sailed in with his father as a boy.

The latter story made me envious, as I’d never done anything so adventurous in my youth and it seemed a shame. No doubt because of this, I couldn’t resist saying, as we dropped down the slope towards Kabak, that a schooner was what we called a large glass of beer in Australia.

‘That’s if you you’re in New South Wales,’ I added, noting my companion’s flabbergasted expression. ‘If you happen to find yourself in South Australia you’ll discover that a schooner is what we call a middy in New South Wales. They also have a thing called a butcher, which is two hundred millilitres and, in my opinion, not much use for anything. In Victoria, meanwhile, they call butchers glasses and middies pots. It can become quite confusing if you are travelling around.’

‘Clearly,’ said Marcus. 

Thus our conversation swung, most entertainingly, back and forth on the descent to Kabak. We found the beach depressingly crowded, the beer-drinking folk already established for the day and a couple of boomboxes belting out raucous music. At far end of the beach the local hippies had created a complex pattern of stones on the shingle that nobody who was not on another planet could make head nor tail of. Overhead, among the pines, dome tents in a range of bright fluorescent colours had proliferated.

Our path resumed at the rear of the beach, starting behind a makeshift humpy adorned with the guernseys of several Turkish football teams and enclosed by a barrier of rusty chicken wire strung between drunkenly leaning grey timber fenceposts. Red-and-yellow flashes daubed on rocks and tree-trunks guided us upwards, at an alarming gradient, through the silent, butterfly-haunted forest to a prominent saddle high above the sea, where a black-and-yellow metal signpost pointed in two directions – vertically up the mountainside to Alinca, and eastward, along the coast, to Kalabantia. The latter, the sign informed us, lay three kilometres distant.

After taking our bearings we strode on, following another rough, but clearly discernible, path that meandered through the trees, alternately dropping down towards the sea, then climbing back up again to the base of vast cliffs of grey-and-ochre limestone that towered imposingly overhead. As the forest closed around us the sense of going off the beaten track was palpable. This mild hint of adventure filled us with a wonderful sense of joie de vivre and inspired new heights of eloquence in Marcus, who treated me to a lengthy and most interesting discourse on the demise of the cod-fishing industry in Newfoundland. The forest, meanwhile, was spectacular, thick not only with lovely, resin-scented pines, but also wonderfully twisted old carob trees and red-barked arbutus, or strawberry, trees among whose shiny and faintly serrated leaves hung tiny dupes of newly-budded fruit. Dry brown needles carpeted the ground and there were clumps of dark green mastic and woody Jerusalem sage whose abundant blooms, the bright yellow of mustard, shone among the greenwood like tiny lamps.

‘You know, this plant doesn’t exude the faintest odour,’ I said, interrupting Marcus, who was lamenting the lot of the Newfie fishermen made redundant by the thoughtless rape of the sea. ‘And that’s because it’s not a sage at all, but a type of phlomis.’Marcus made a face, as if to say ‘Really?’ then plucked a wrinkled and leathery leaf which he held ruminatively to his nose. ‘No,’ he said at last, ‘you’re right.’

It was our final illumination before arriving at Cennet, or Paradise, Beach, a long strand of yellow-gold sand and pale grey shingle, washed by limpid turquoise shallows, that appeared temptingly through the trees. A hand-painted wooden sign indicated the presence, somewhere among the forest, of a campsite. But all was still and quiet and there wasn’t a soul around apart from a solitary beachcomber whom we could see ambling up and down along the water’s edge, his lazy loping stride that of a man who didn’t have a care in the world. As we watched his progress from the height overhead it seemed almost a shame to invade his solitude.

To be continued…